Complaints Policy

We are committed to providing a high-quality legal service to all our clients. When something goes wrong we need you to tell us about it. This will help us to improve our standards.

If you have a complaint, please contact our Compliance Officer for Legal Practice (COLP). You can contact the COLP at The Housing Claims, 701 Chester Road, Stretford, Manchester, M32 0RW, by e-mail info@thehousingclaims.co.uk

What will happen next

1. We will send you a letter acknowledging your complaint and asking you to confirm or explain any details. If it seems appropriate we will suggest a meeting at this stage. We will also let you know the name of the person who will be dealing with your complaint.
2. We will then open a file for your complaint and commence our investigation. This may involve one or more of the following steps:-
   • We will ask the person who acted for you to provide their comments on your complaint. We will then examine their reply and any information in your file, and we may also speak to the person who acted for you.
   • We will then write, discuss and hopefully resolve your complaint.
   • We aim to resolve any complaint within 7 working days of its receipt.
   • In appropriate cases we would offer an apology/a reduction in any bill or a repayment in relation to any payment received.
   • Alternatively if the matter cannot be resolved swiftly then we would liaise with the person dealing with your file to attend to any problem to your satisfaction before the file is continued with.

At this stage if you are still not satisfied please let us know. We will then arrange to review our decision. We would generally intend to do this within a further 10 days

This will happen in one of the following ways:-

The person handling your complaint will review their decision

or

We will arrange for an alternative manager or partner in the firm who has not been involved in your complaint to review the decision.

3. We will let you know the result of the review within 5 days of the end of the review.
4. If you are still not satisfied you can contact the Legal Ombudsman about your complaint. We very much hope this will not be necessary. The postal address of the Legal Ombudsman is PO Box 6806, Wolverhampton WV1 9WJ. Their web address is www.legalombudsman.org.uk. There is a time limit for complaints to the Legal Ombudsman. If you wish to make a complaint, you must contact them within 6 years of the act or omission, or 3 years from when you should have known there was cause for complaint, whichever is later.

The Legal Ombudsman will not consider a complaint before the solicitor has had the opportunity to seek to resolve the complaint through its own internal complaints procedure.

Please note that there is a shorter time limit of 12 months from the date of our written response to your complaint for you to refer a complaint to the Legal Ombudsman if we have given you the explanation about the Legal Ombudsman contained in this letter, including this warning about the reduced time limit.

Complaining about data processing

If you have concerns about how we have processed your personal data, you should initially contact the COLP by email at info@thehousingclaims.co.uk or at our registered address.

If you remain unsatisfied, you have a right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office – concerns can be reported online at www.ico.org.uk, by telephone to 0303 123 1113 or 01625 545 745, or in writing to the Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF.